The closure is due to the cancellation of the Reseller Agreement with LizardTech that permitted us in the past to resell DjVu products from LizardTech, and from the failure of JRA to secure licensing from LizardTech for the JRAPublish, JRAConvert and JRAMetamaker products for DjVu. These products are the first to offer dual support for both DjVu and PDF file formats. These products will continue to be available for the PDF format only, at our sister site: www.searchpdf.com.

JRASearch will continue to support the search-indexing of DjVu as well as PDF, and this product is also available from www.searchpdf.com.

The PlanetDjVu store remains open as a service to the DjVu user community that is also supported by DjVuLibre, representing the "Open Source Side" of DjVu, and also to support those who purchased DjVu products in the past.

The Forum of PlanetDjVu remains a place where DjVu users can share insights and issues with each other.

We are greatly disappointed by this closure. We can only hope that some day in the future, direct commercial licensing of the DjVu Reference Library will be made available by the format owner, and that the commercial licensing of working versions of DjVu encoding SDKs will be made available. This would then permit us to release JRAPublish, an encoding application that rivals Acrobat Capture and Kofax Ascent Capture in sophistication and in features, along with the other DjVu applications produced by JRA.

We conclude by repeating the remarks of Oliver Guy, made recently in the Forum of PlanetDjVu:

"I regularly check JRA's site for fresh news about DjVu. Congratulations on

your work!

Lizardtech never answers to inquiries and hardly seems to market this product.

It is a huge disapointment to see how such a promising technology is being spoiled for obscure reasons.

In the near future, it seems that no other software is likely to obtain such compression efficiency for compound documents.LuraDocument lacks quality, Jpeg2000 part 6 is slumbering, TIFF-FX hardly exists.